The least affordable places to buy a house

There are now just a vanishingly small number of places in the UK where housing could be described as affordable. In the past 15 years house prices have doubled, while wages have risen just 28%, so for most people on a typical wage, buying an average home is a matter of borrowing an alarming multiple of your salary and saddling yourself with huge debts.

The traditional multiple of three times salary is laughable in the UK today, where only Copeland in the Lake District offers properties at this level. In fact, according to the TUC, there are no longer any areas in the South East, South West, London and the East of England where average house prices are less than five times the average wage.

In other areas, first-time-buyers dream of the possibility of buying a house for just five times salary. The Centre for Cities research group has just published its list of the least affordable places to live in the UK, where the cheapest town on the list requires buyers to find more than eight times the average salary.
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It won't surprise anyone to learn that London is in the top ten. However, it may come as something of a shock to learn that it's not the least affordable city in the UK - and that in the city which takes that particular title, the price of an average property is almost 15 times the average salary.

So who makes the top ten, and why is housing so unaffordable here?

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